Marathon Tips

Dear editor

As a 56 year old recreational athlete for some 30 years with a marathon personal best of 2hrs 44min and a personal worst of 3hrs 29min, I found Sean Fyfe’s tale of marathon woe somewhat amusing (SIB50, June 2005). An unimaginable number of athletes have run good marathons over careers spanning decades without knowing what hyponatraemia is.

I find science a fascinating thing but avoid hanging labels on the complex systems which comprise the human body when we lack so much understanding of how they intersect and how they vary in individuals. Even randomly controlled studies following the rules of science only end up being a best guess.

I learned how to train for marathon long before I did my BSc degree. And if my unscientific approach has anything anyone finds useful, you’re welcome to it.

You cannot replicate race-day conditions, the stress of getting to the start, the pressure to perform, sharing the route with 30,000 others. Bearing this in mind, don’t do anything leading up to the race that you haven’t done many times before in training. This doesn’t just mean diet and fluid intake; if you haven’t tried a two-week taper before, how do you know it’s going to work for you? Doing things that conform to received wisdom and seem to make sense doesn’t always work, as Sean painfully discovered.

As you cannot replicate race-day conditions, and may not have completed the full marathon distance in training, you need to find out what makes your ‘wheels wobbly’, and learn how to cope with it. The sooner this happens, the better. I tend to think of it as developing a mind/body relationship, and as both are in a constant state of change, the relationship is a dynamic one.

This is the hard bit, as it means getting into the 20-mile training runs a lot earlier than most training schedules dictate, but it should mean that come race day, with eight or 12 20+ mile runs in your legs, there won’t be any doubt in your mind that you can complete the marathon without recourse to untried scientific fixes.

Jim Chandler

Surrey, UK